please help, My rollei 35 prints are garbage

[lawnpotter]

I just bought a rollei 35(Tessar lens) from KEH, and I have about another week to return it. I just got developed from a good local mass print place a roll of 24. I used 400 asa fuji superia. The pictures looked reall grainy and contrasty, My room mate said they looked like they came from a disposable camera. I took simmilar composititions with the same film using my olympus trip35 To compare. The trip 35 looked much better. better colours and way less grain. I asked the lab guy who actually took some good courses in college for lab work and he said the Rollei 35 pictures are grainy cause the lens is so sharp. He said I should use slower film. and a real black and white film would be much better with this camera. My intention all a long was to use this camera with TriX. I only used colour to test it. My Problem is that it will take a week untill tri x test prints come back from the lab. I only have aweek to get my money back for the camera. Is the lab guy right? Does the 400 asa superia look so bad cause the lens is so sharp? Will Trix look much better? Thanks for your help. Bye the way my Olympus epic looks great with Trix 400.

 

[Celloman]

It's possible that your shots were not correctly exposed. There could be a problem with the camera and it's shutter speeds. Not likely a lens sharpness issue.

Mike

 

[erikhaugsby]

The 'sharpness' of a lens has absolutely no impact on the film grain/structure--if you put the same roll in two different cameras you will get the same film characteristics. Is it possible that the film from the Rollei were improperly processed?

edit: Mike also brought up a good point, and was quicker than me. What did you use to meter the shots from the Rollei? Built-in meter? Handheld meter? Guess exposure?

 

[lawnpotter]

I used hand meter and sunny 16 and a lot of guessing, but the negatives didnt look to bad from my very untrained eye

 

[M. Valdemar]

You need a lot of practice and trial and error if you want to get good results from manual cameras.

Each camera has it's own quirks that you have to get used to. Likely there is nothing wrong with the Rollei. Operator error.

Notice that my post is somewhat easy to read because of something called "paragraphs".

 

[erikhaugsby]

Notice that my post is somewhat easy to read because of something called "paragraphs".

Notice that the period is intended to go inside of the parenthesis, not outside. Good example: "paragraphs." Bad example: "paragraphs".

Perhaps it's time for you to exit your little hypnotic trance and let nature take its due course.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Notice that the period is intended to go inside of the parenthesis, not outside. Good example: "paragraphs." Bad example: "paragraphs".

No. This is a regional convention. In English it is normal to place the full stop outside inverted commas -- and the fact that I use completely different words shows how much English and American have diverged. In English, and until today I had assumed in American too, 'parenthesis' as a punctuation mark normally refers to 'round brackets' (thus).

Not only are UK and US conventions different: the things that many regard as 'rules' are not even widespread, but relate merely to a particular bee in the bonnet of one of their early teachers (or its absence). Thus as a Cornishman I was taught that 'further' and 'farther' are regional variations and interchangeable. I was therefore much confused to learn that one of my editors had been taught that they refer to time and distance (or some such). Either view is defensible.

I fully agree that the point about paragraphs could have been more tactfully made, but adopting the same tactics is, in my view, counter-productive.

To answer the original question, I fully agree with you that the sharpness of the lens is irrelevant to the grain and contrast of the film, and I suspect that the problem was under-exposure. Shoot another roll, rating the film at one-half the ISO speed, i.e. giving twice the exposure. If in doubt, bracket in the direction of overexposure.

With colour negative films, reduced exposure means bigger 'grain' (dye-clouds) whereas with conventional monochrome, more exposure means bigger grain. In both cases, increased exposure also means reduced sharpness: exposure is always a trade-off between grain, sharpness and tonality, so there is no such thing as 'correct' exposure. ISO speeds are merely the best starting point that has yet been devised.

Cheers,

Roger

 

[Sonnar Brian]

I just picked up a Rollei 35-TE with the Tessar 40/3.5, still putting the first test roll through it.

Some items to note:
1) Always advance the film before collapsing the lens. Damage can result if you do not. With that said, I would check the Shutter Speed and Aperture control of your camera to make sure the linkage is good. If it "slipped", there could be problems and you might not be getting the F-Stop and Shutter Speed as intended. I would also check that the lens tube is locking into place correctly, and the mechanism was not damaged.

2) The camera was made to take Mercury-Cell batteries. Mine uses a PX-27. I cleaned the contacts on my camera, voltage on the battery looked good, and meter looks accurate. I'm not sure how voltage sensitive the meter will be with a 6v replacement.

I'm looking forward to finishing the roll and checking results.

 

[payasam]

Does the film look correctly exposed? You might compare the Rollei one with the other: hold them up to the light together. Lens sharpness has nothing to do with graininess.

I've been an editor for over 35 years, and to my knowledge inverted commas are nowhere called parentheses.

 

[Turtle]

look at the negs. Gross underexposure would result in grainy horrid prints. If the negs are fine it could be bad processing. Try a roll of slide film, make 100% sure you have set good exposure and get them processed asap. Even if you are a touch out you should see if the camera is operating properly. Take exposures from an SLR you are fmailiar with if it helps.

 

[Turtle]

Its' really does not matter if their are grammatical errors in someones' posts' as long as we know what they are talking about. Its not what matters. It would be shame if someone who loves photography but has terrible punctuation and spelling cannot find respite here amongst friends.

So their 😉

Tom

 

[payasam]

Who are the other five?

 

[kshapero]

I get this problem, too at times. If I shoot 400 ISO film in a dark room at 1/8 shutter speed and an aperture of 1.5, sometimes I get very grainy photos as if I shot 3200 film. Why is that?

 

[oftheherd]

I think everyone posted something helpful to the OP.

It's just so much fun for those of us who write a lot (for whatever reason) to get in a brawl over punctuation. Proper punctuation is important to at least six people worldwide, so worthy of debate. :angel:

Well, that"s not true: It used to bee important to me butt I finallly saw the lite. You'r now down to Five.

😀 😀

 

[Jonathan R]

Lawnpotter, that Tessar lens is sharp, but it's also low in contrast. If your prints were very contrasty, you should definitely suspect something other than the lens. Mike's suggestion about exposure sounds very plausible. I'd suggest retrying with a 200 ISO film and a different lab. Bracket exposures, and match each print with its negative to see what might be happening.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Proper punctuation is important to at least six people worldwide, so worthy of debate. :angel:

Several thousand, presumably: Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves (which is mainly about punctuation) sold very well indeed and is, I believe, still in print.

When it comes to style books, though, the best you can say of them is that they reflect house styles, e.g. New York Times, Oxford University Press. Certain usages are simply illiterate, such as the greengrocer's apostrophe (for plurals -- apple's, pear's); some are conventions which do not bear very close analysis (such as it's/its); and many are matters of personal taste, or slavish obedience to an English teacher who way be long dead and may well have been poorly informed, at least on certain points, in life.

Cheers,

Roger

 

[mfogiel]

kshapero
The somewhat "grainy" appearance of wide open shots is something I have also noticed, and I attribute this to insufficient resolution - wide open MTF of many lenses plus a 400ISO film simply lower the MTF substantially - the cure? Best lenses you can get hold of and/or slower film.
To illustrate the point:
A wide open shot with the Nokton 35/1.2 and Acros, 1/2000:

and another shot wide open with the same lens and 400 ISO film at 1/15:

As you can see, the second shot looks like done with a much worse lens than the first one.

However, this may not answer the point in question - I'd be inclined to think the problem lies with underexposure of the chromogenic film.
Here's a comparison of shots made on Kodak BW400CN, the first one exposed at 200 ISO:
(FM3A+Distagon35/2 ZF)

and this one made on a 6x6 film at 1600 ISO, as you can see, underexposure blows up the grain immensely:
(Hasselblad+Sonnar 250/5.6)

 

[Jonathan R]

Oh, and if you are using a lab you may be particularly disappointed by the results from a BW film. I find films need a little extra development for that lens to boost contrast. Strangely enough my best results with it have been with T-Max 100 and T-Max developer. It also helps to use a lenshood, and a yellow filter (cute little thing for that lens) whenever the light allows.

 

[tripod]

I wouldn't characterize a Rollei Tessar lens as "low contrast.". (Just want to have all my punctuation bases covered. 🙂)

The camera and lens cannot be blamed for graininess or bad colours. It's either bad exposure or processing.

 

[Rogrund]

Sounds like underexposure to me.

And, if you're interested in the different conventions regarding commas and periods inside or outside quotation marks, I can recommend this informative link, read under "Typographical considerations".

As you can see, I much prefer the logical quotation.